Teutonic Knights

The Teutonic Order was established in Acre in the last decade of the twelfth century.

Coat of arms of the Teutonic Order Grand Master.

Its origins lay in the collapse of the German contingent of the Third Crusade. In the

spring and early summer of 1190, the Germans led by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa,

who formed the largest faction of the Crusader army, crossed Asia Minor on the way to

Tyre. However, the emperor was drowned while crossing the Saleph River on 10 June

1190, an incident which led to the total collapse of his army. Many of the Germans

returned to Europe and others fell victim to an epidemic which broke out amongst the

regrouping forces at Antioch. Despite these disasters, many Germans did arrive to

participate in the siege of Acre, joining the other contingents of the Crusader armies

from England and France. According to a contemporary text known as Narracio de

primordiis ordinis theutonici, a fleet of fifty-five ships of German Crusaders had joined

King Richard I of England, who occupied Acre on 12 July 1191 after an extended

siege.

Richard went on to recover the coast as far as Ascalon, but failed to retake Jerusalem.

Consequently Acre’s importance rose as the interim administrative capital of the rump

kingdom. During the siege of Acre in 1190, some members of the German army,

citizens of Lübeck and Bremen, established a makeshift hospital outside the eastern

walls of the city near the Cemetery of St Nicholas, using a ship’s sail for shelter. When

the city fell to the Crusaders, the Germans purchased a garden inside the walls near the

Gate of St Nicholas and built a church, hospital, tower and other buildings there. The

hospital was dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

In 1197/8 a meeting of German ecclesiastical and lay leaders in Acre decided that

the Germans should model their care of the poor and sick on the example of the

Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, while taking the Templars as the model for their

religious and military activities.

 A papal bull of Pope Innocent III confirmed these

decisions in February 1199, and the Teutonic Knights adopted the Templar Rule

(which they later modified for their own needs) and its white mantle.

The name subsequently adopted by this Order, the Hospital of St Mary of the House

of the Teutons in Jerusalem, appears only about two decades later. It served as the basis

for the successful claim of the Grand Master, Hermon von Salza (1210–39), to Frederick

II in 1229 that the Order should receive the property formerly held by the German

hospital in Jerusalem.

As latecomers to the scene, the aspirations of the Teutonic Order to expand and to

gain possession of rural properties required them to centre their activities in the

Galilee, which was less intensely occupied by the Hospitallers and Templars than most

of the other fertile farmland in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In order to do so, they set

up a rural headquarters in Castellum Regis (Chasteiau dou Rei), a castle located on the

crest of a hill overlooking farmland in the hills of the western Galilee. In 1226 the

Order acquired extensive rural property in the region. Probably in the following year,

work began on a new castle, Starkenberg, more commonly known by its French name,

Montfort, which subsequently (by 1244) replaced Acre as the central headquarters of

the Teutonic Order in the Latin East.

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